Background build for my 90g Tank.

[flower]

I have an old solid blue plastic covering on my 90g tank for the background, it's falling down and wrinkled where I tried to tape it back up...so I need a new background. Spanko posted what he called the perfect background. I'm stealing my idea from there. I decided to use the most light weight materials so I can just hang it on the back. This is what I've come up with....
The plan:
I am going to create a shadow box out of 1/2 inch Styrofoam insulation panels and use the plastic clear panel in the center as a diffuser for the painted Styrofoam background. The entire background should be no thicker than 1 ¼ thick. I plan to use the Great stuff instead of cork to create the rocks and paint it all to look like the deep ocean. My tank is 48 inches so the edges will be roughed up to look like a cave of rock, this will also help hide the overflow.
I will take pictures as I go so you can see what I did.
Materials:

• 
  Crazy glue gel
• 
  1 Polystyrene light panel 23 ¾ X 47 ¾ (cracked glass design)
• 
  ½ inch Styrofoam insulation (comes in group of 5 panels)
• 
  1 Can of Great Stuff Foam
  Blue, purple and black spray paints
  Green, light blue and black touch up paint (acrylic paint small jars)
  Strip moon lights

 

[acrylic51]

PICS!!!!!!!

 

[jerth6932]

Really interested in what ya come up with! I second the pix request.

 

[flower]

LOL...I have pictures and I'm going to show you...HOWEVER, alas my shadow box is not to be. I was beatiful I didn't take a picture of the full completed box because it needed the light to shine for the full effect. It just looked like a froasted panel so I didn't bother. I was going to take that picture with the light shining over it for the full effect.
Oh and crazy glue does not work, I used pond foam to hold everything together.
When it was all dried and finished.......it wouldn't fit over my overflow, so I had to break one side and rebond it. The next hurdle was the return. It could be seen, and it wasn't pretty, I created a nice shape to put in front of it but it didn't look good..it ruined the look of everything.
So in the end I painted my frosted panel and attached it to the back of the tank.
Here are my pictures.
The frosted panel (cracked glass it was called) It has a nice texture

Materials



Some nice shapes





The very back of the box completed..3D The paint melted the backing a little and gave it a really awesome texture You can't see it very well in the picture. Behind the frosted panel it looked so cool.

Before....

This is it now..oh and I fixed the spray bar to the grey PVC conduit. When I get coral in there the dark back will look good. At least it isn't falling down anymore. You can't really tell it in the picture but I used black, purple and blue to paint it.